“Once the political season is under way,” Biden said, “action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over. That is what is fair to the nominee . . . Otherwise . . . we will be in deep trouble as an institution,” stuck in “a bitter fight, no matter how good a person is nominated by the president.”

He was no doubt feeling guilty about his own role in (successfully) demonizing Judge Robert Bork in 1986, and in the (failed) campaign of personal destruction against then-Judge Clarence Thomas in 1991. Biden might as well have said, We don’t want to smear another good man — so don’t send us one.

Late in the George W. Bush years, Sen. Chuck Schumer said much the same: “We should reverse the presumption of confirmation” lest the lame-duck president shift the court’s balance.

Here’s McConnell on Wed­nesday: “The next justice could fundamentally alter the direction of the Supreme Court . . . so of course the American people should have a say.”

Obama wants Garland to take Antonin Scalia’s seat — replacing a conservative with a liberal. It exactly mirrors the situation where Biden and Schumer drew their lines; why is he pretending the GOP might go along?

Again, McConnell has it right: “It seems clear President Obama made this nomination not with the intent of seeing the nominee confirmed, but in order to politicize it for purposes of the election.”

That is, to try to paint Republicans as obstructionists for playing by the rules the Democrats set when they ran the Senate.

If Democrats want to change those rules, they’ll have to do it when it doesn’t nakedly serve their own partisan interest.